“From our contemporary perspective, it is difficult to appreciate the extraordinary effect that clock time has had upon modern and modernizing societies. And it is difficult to remember, so deeply has its logic impregnated cultures and societies, that it is not “time” at all, but a social construction given the seal of scientific truth and validity through the revolution in Newtonian physics. According to this mathematical perspective, time exists not in nature and humans, but that these exist in time. Newton put the case famously in his 1687 Principia when he wrote that: “Absolute true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external.”
“Manuel Castells, in his book The Information Age: The Rise of the Network Society, argues that globalization and the information age are heralding the era of domination by real-time, or what he calls “timeless time.” Real time, for Castells, is also a kind of “non-time” which means that as the network society becomes more encompassing of culture and society, “linear, measurable, predictable time is being shattered…in a movement of extraordinary historical significance”. In his speculative social theory, Paul Virilio is even more explicit when he writes in that “the teletechnologies of real time…are killing ‘present’ time by isolating it from its here and now, in favour of a commutative elsewhere that no longer has anything to do with our “concrete presence” in the world…”
“Perhaps an easily comprehended way to think about timescapes is to think of an array of temporal features - flowing durational “scapes” - that exist in lived reality, in us, in our cultures and in nature. Each feature, or temporal scape is implicated in all the others but not necessarily of equal importance. Context is the “now” or the “present.” It is the intersecting point of contact between the different timescapes that touch our lives - or those timescapes that we ourselves bring to a context or situation to generate a uniquely experienced timescape. As Christopher Prendergast puts it: “What we call ‘the present’ is a dynamic cluster of temporal traces, of the past it has been and the future it is in the process of becoming”. What we create and experience in “the present” is, in effect, a timescape that is part of a socially constituted temporal whole, part of what is to be alive in a becoming and emergent social world.”
(…) As archeologist Christopher Gosden said: People create time and space through their actions. Time and space, in turn, become part of the structure of habitual action, shaping the nature of reference between actions.”
“The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future.”
— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
“It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself.”
“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
— Carl Sagan
“You are waiting for the revolution? Let it be! My own began a long time ago! When you are ready (god, what an endless wait!) I won’t mind going with you for a while. But when you stop, I shall continue on my way toward the great and sublime conquest of the nothing!”
“Au contraire, it is my view that we are entering, and actually are already in, a deterritorialized age of transformation, an age unlike any other in that the speed and overload of information is transforming us, and yes destabilizing us, disrupting us in such a fashion as to allow a new kind of mind to emerge, the hyperconnected mind. (…) The hyperflow of information is destroying the idea that we are the same, that our brains are the same or that culture is the same as it was yesterday. What is happening is that we are shifting our inner virtuality, our mind conceptualizations, from a centric point of view to a multiplied encultured reality, a hyperconnected reality. A reality that is as fresh as it is exciting, as challenging as it is transformative; no longer are we to believe that we are alone, or that issues that are ‘far’ are of no interest to us. We are at present in a transitional period of rapid advancement, an era of supreme importance in the history of humanity, a phase in our concatenated evolution in which new forms of literacy are being invented, new methods of inter-subjective enhancement are at play and we evolve because of it.”
“It was an old story that was no longer true. Truth can go out of stories you know. What was true becomes meaningless, even a lie, because the truth has gone into another story. The water of the spring rises in another place.”
“We live in a rainbow of chaos.”
— Paul Cezanne
“This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Good-night.”
“Life is both sad and solemn. we are let into a wonderful world, we meet one another here, greet each other— and wander together for a brief moment. Then we lose each other and disappear as suddenly and unreasonably as we arrived.”
